AI Attribution Governance: Enforcing AI Disclosure Policies at the CI Level

The open-source ecosystem is converging on a hard question: when a commit is written with AI assistance, how do we know — and how do we enforce the disclosure policy? Python's discourse, Linux kernel's Assisted-by trailer, Fedora's AI policy, Apache's disclosure guidelines — every major project is grappling with this. But until now, there has been no tool at the CI level to enforce whatever policy a project chooses. Commit Check v2.11.0 introduces AI Attribution Governance — a new feature that detects known AI tool signatures in commit messages and lets projects decide whether to forbid them outright. To our knowledge, no existing tool enforces this kind of policy at the CI level. The industry need The conversation around AI disclosure is no longer theoretical: The Linux kernel standardized on the Assisted-by: trailer format — but deliberately stopped short of CI enforcement. As Sasha Levin noted at the Maintainers Summit, the kernel sets the convention, not the gate. The Python community is actively discussing whether Claude Code usage should be documented VS Code issue #313962 proposes replacing Co-authored-by with Assisted-by for AI agents Fedora requires AI disclosure (recommends the Assisted-by trailer). QEMU and Gentoo go further and forbid AI-generated contributions entirely. Each community defines its own policy — but none provides a neutral enforcement layer. That is the gap Commit Check fills. Configuration: a single toggle Commit Check keeps it simple. One configuration value, three ways to set it. TOML ( cchk.toml ): [commit] ai_attribution = "forbid" CLI: commit-check --message --ai-attribution = forbid Environment variable: CCHK_AI_ATTRIBUTION = forbid commit-check --message Two modes: Mode Behavior "ignore" No validation (default, backward compatible) "forbid" Rejects any commit containing known AI tool signatures There is no require mode in this release — only ignore and forbid . The reason is pragmatic: requiring an Assisted-by or similar trailer is